Now that we know how each of the senators will vote on the Kavanaugh nomination, I've done some number grinding for the purpose of discovering how many Americans are represented by the 51 votes for confirmation and the 49 against. If both of a state's senators voted for confirmation, I considered that the entire population of the state is represented by a Yes vote. Same principle if both senators voted against confirmation. For states represented by one senator who voted Yes and one who voted No, I considered half the state's population to be represented by a vote to confirm and the other half to be represented by a vote to reject. For the population of each state, I used this data.
It then turns out that the 51 votes to confirm Judge Kavanaugh were cast by senators who represent 142,444,977 Americans. The 49 votes to reject the nomination were cast by senators who represent 179,733,425 Americans. The difference between these two figures--just a little more than 37 million--is substantially more than 10 percent of the country's population. (An election in which one candidate beats the other by more than 10 percentage points is usually considered a landslide.) Of course, Kavanaugh was nominated by President Trump, who attained his office despite losing the national popular vote by about 2.9 million ballots, or more than 2 percent of all votes cast. "The American people" did not vote for right-wing jurisprudence at the Supreme Court, but that's what they're getting.
And it's only going to get worse. In another 20 years, 70 percent of the population will live in the 15 most populous states. Those 15 states will of course have 30 senators, and the other 70 senators will represent less than a third of the country's population. Who has the power and is steadily accruing more and more of it? Older, whiter, more rural and conservative voters. I wonder whether it's necessarily "alarmist" to worry about the prospect of the country breaking apart, as it almost did in the middle of the 19th century, and for similar reasons.
People can work from home now. Maybe we Democrats should start organizing an internal migration plan. There are more of us, but to get our way it's not enough to vote. We have to be more diffuse throughout the land.
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